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Tuesday, 20 May 2008

Orthodox Jewish youths burn New Testaments in Or Yehuda

Now I guess my first response to this story was, well they had it coming. Christian bigots who support the Israeli state and its oppression of the Palestinians, are hardly the first claimants on our sympathy. If anyone has it coming then they are prime candidates.

Those who welcome Armaggedon can hardly complain when they get a little taste of the fire and brimstone they'd hand out to others. However what this story shows is not simply Christian messianic bigots getting their comeuppance.

It is a demonstration of the bigoted and reactonary attitude of Orthodox Judaism in Israel towards other religions and people. Judaism legitimates everything that happens to the Palestinians. They are the new Amalekites. The most backward and regressive parts of the Talmud and Mishneh are hauled out in order to support this racist attitude to non-Jews (they have animal souls, their blood is not equal to Jews etc.). And although this attitude is usually evinced towards the Palestinians it is also, when they let their hair down, applied to Palestinians too.

Orthodox Jews set fire to hundreds of copies of the New Testament in the latest act of violence against Christian missionaries in the Holy Land.Or Yehuda Deputy Mayor Uzi Aharon said missionaries recently entered a
neighborhood in the predominantly religious town of 34,000 in central Israel, distributing hundreds of New Testaments and missionary material.

After receiving complaints, Aharon said, he got into a loudspeaker car last Thursday and drove through the neighborhood, urging people to turn over the material to Jewish religious students who went door to door to collect it.

"The books were dumped into a pile and set afire in a lot near a synagogue," he said.

The newspaper Maariv reported Tuesday that hundreds of yeshiva students took part in the book-burning. But Aharon told The Associated Press that only a few students were present, and that he was not there when the books were torched.

"Not all of the New Testaments that were collected were burned, but hundreds were," he said.

He said he regretted the burning of the books, but called it a commandment to burn materials that urge Jews to convert.

"I certainly don't denounce the burning of the booklets, he said. I denounce those who distributed the booklets."

Jews worship from the Old Testament, including the Five Books of Moses and the writings of the ancient prophets. Christians revere the Old Testament as well as the New Testament, which contains the ministry of Jesus.

Calev Myers, an attorney who represents Messianic Jews, or Jews who accept Jesus as their savior, demanded in an interview with Army Radio that all those involved be put on trial. He estimated there were 10,000 Messianic Jews, who are also known as Jews for Jesus, in Israel.

Police had no immediate comment.

Israeli authorities and Orthodox Jews frown on missionary activity aimed at Jews, though in most cases it is not illegal. Still, the concept of a Jew burning books is abhorrent to many in Israel because of the association with Nazis torching piles of Jewish books during the Holocaust of World War II.

Earlier this year, the teenage son of a prominent Christian missionary was seriously wounded when a package bomb delivered to the family's West Bank home went off in his hands.

Last year, arsonists burst into a Jerusalem church used by Messianic Jews and set the building on fire, raising suspicions that Jewish extremists were behind the attack. No one claimed responsibility, but the same church was burned down 25 years ago by ultra-Orthodox Jewish extremists.